Who Sets the Doomsday Clock?
28th January 2026
I’m sure you’ve seen hand-wringing articles in the Narrative Media about the so-called “doomsday clock”, one of the most Useful-Idiot scams of the Cold War.
It’s the opening session of the three-day 2025 Nobel Laureate Assembly for the Prevention of Nuclear War. The gathering is convened by scientists and nuclear security experts alarmed that a new arms race, eroding global cooperation, and the rise of artificial intelligence in warfare—among other factors—are pushing civilization closer to catastrophe. Timed to the 80th anniversary of the Trinity Test, the world’s first nuclear explosion, the assembly aims to produce a declaration urging world leaders to reduce the nuclear threat.
The same urgency drives the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and its iconic Doomsday Clock, the stark graphic that represents how close we are to self-annihilation. The clock is set yearly by the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board chaired by Daniel Holz, PhD, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Chicago.
In January, six months before the Nobel Assembly, Holz stood at a lectern at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., to announce the time. “It is now 89 seconds to midnight,” he said, as four solemn presenters swiveled a turntable to reveal a pared-down quarter clockface, a white wedge rimmed by black dots for numbers, the hands angled so sharply they overlapped. It was the closest to midnight since the clock’s inception in 1947.